


on four feet

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff and Angst, M/M, WWII, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-09 03:22:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6887887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve had gotten used to being a werewolf. He wasn't sure he was ever going to get used to Peggy's endless questions, but he had a few questions of his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on four feet

**Author's Note:**

> In the drafts folder (where cabloom the benevolent deity works her magic) this was titled, "Peggy, the Werewolf Princess." Deciding this didn't seem like an appropriate title, I went back and read Saki's short story, "Gabriel Ernst." And so should you, because it's excellent and slightly disturbing.
> 
> There are werewolves. There is some mention of blood, and frightened children, and frightened children being briefly locked in cages. There is _no plot_. All werewolf universe building is a panache of the millions of fanfics I have read.

“You’re not taking this seriously!”  Peggy tried to snatch the almanac out of the air where Bucky was juggling it and two silver knives, but Bucky had the reflexes of a boy renowned as the best shortstop in Brooklyn  _ before  _ he’d been turned, and he tugged the book effortlessly down while Peggy was left to dodge the knives.

Steve opened his own almanac—Peggy had brought one for each of them, though he could have told her that there was no point.  Born wolves had always held onto some strange superstitions when it came to the turned, and apparently one of those was that the bitten couldn’t feel the waxing moon.

“What are all these black and white circles?” Bucky asked, holding the almanac upside-down and at arm’s length, flattening his voice into a terrible Midwestern drawl he must have learned in boot camp.  “Is it a code?”

Peggy, for all that she was the daughter and heir of Great Britain’s alpha pair and had clearly been under-educated about ordinary werewolves, was also smart enough to know when Bucky was mocking her.

“We don’t need lunar calendars,” Steve explained, after watching Peggy pin Bucky to the ground and threaten to knee him in the balls.

He pulled them both back onto their feet, held out his arm for Peggy to lean on while she dusted off her slacks, and elbowed Bucky in the ribs with the other arm before he stuck his foot back in his mouth.

“But how else will you know when you need to find a cage?” Peggy queried, glancing at the Commandos playing cards a dozen yards away.

_Crap_.  Steve ran a hand through his hair and managed to hold himself rigidly still, knowing it wouldn’t go well if he reached out to Bucky now, his friend a vibrating line of tension at his back.

“That’s a myth, Peggy,” Steve said, keeping his voice low and even, breathing through the blood throbbing in his veins and pulsing in his temples, threatening to curl into teeth and claws.  _ That  _ at least wasn’t a myth—the bitten shifted with passion while the born changed only by choice.  “We don’t go feral when we change.  It’s a physical shift, that’s all, same as yours.”

“Oh.”  Peggy, the smartest woman Steve had ever met, no doubt saw something in Bucky’s thinned lips and the way he shrunk behind Steve.  Her lovely, pale face flushed with regret.  “All the books said—well, I didn’t know.”

“You’re not the only one,” Bucky muttered, but he stepped forward and knocked his shoulder into Steve’s back, the signal that Steve could spin around and tug Bucky close, nuzzle his head against his mate’s neck and lick away the sour scent of old fear.  Steve and Bucky had been bitten the same night, but Steve’s Ma had looked for answers while Bucky’s parents had worried about an infected son around their baby girls.  They had turned him over to the church, with its priests determined to contain what they couldn’t cure.

Peggy stayed a few steps back, because even if her pack was too traditional for found mates (or for two males, still illegal in both their countries, and even worse to have two soldiers, no sense in a pair where neither of them would stay home to mind the pack) she knew that mated pairs demanded space, and had never implied that Steve and Bucky deserved anything less.

“So you don’t need almanacs,” she finally said, once Bucky started grumbling about Steve drooling all over his neck and shoved him away.  “Is there anything you  _ do  _ need?”

Bucky waggled his eyebrows, leaning forward into her space, and Peggy didn’t move at all except to smirk.  “What are you offering, Carter?” he asked, his voice dropping three octaves and curling intention through the words until they shivered down Steve’s spine.

Peggy’s canines lengthened by a hair, pressed against her bottom lip, the crimson slash of her smile.  “Nothing you could handle, Barnes,” she replied, and Steve was relieved that the Commandos didn’t bat an eye when their SSR liaison wrestled their sergeant to the ground for the second time.

Steve grinned, and ignored Bucky’s cries for help.  Five humans, an assigned alpha who could pin any of them with one hand and sip tea with the other, and his mate.  It wasn’t proper—wasn’t anything Peggy’s parents would approve of, wasn’t legal in any state—but it was Steve’s pack, all the same.

* * *

Steve forgave Peggy her ignorance, and Bucky forgave them both their insatiable curiosity: Steve for all the werewolf lore they hadn’t learned, Peggy for all that she could glean about turned wolves.

After all, the last bitten lycanthrope on record had died in 1898, over a hundred years before.  The priests in 1930—the ones suddenly in possession of twelve-year-old James Barnes—hadn’t known what to do with an infected child, had tried to save his soul from demons and scared him so badly that Bucky hadn’t been able to take human form for weeks after Steve had broken into the church and wrenched him free.

According to legend—according to Peggy’s father Gerald, who was friends with Dr. Erskine but still made Steve want to tuck his tail and run—the witch hunts of the sixteenth century had driven lycanthropes underground.  (According to Gerald, the weres had mastered the bloodlust long before, but his calm tone sent Steve’s hackles up and set Bucky growling, both of them too scarred to believe the lie.)

Sarah Rogers had knocked on doors, had followed every crumb of knowledge and every soused story before finding a wise woman who gave her herbs to soothe Steve’s temper, ointment for the hands curled into claws.  Steve had lain on his sickbed howling, half boy and half monster, one more infection than his body could survive.

(It had turned out his body couldn’t survive Bucky’s absence, but they hadn’t known that then.  Hadn’t known much at all, beyond the flash of teeth and the overwhelming throb of pain when their skin hung in shreds.)

The bloodlust was never really gone, though the born wolves had tried.  They had kept their young men close, kept them so far from civilization that there were no humans to hunt, matched them with mates and seasoned prey with calming herbs so that they wouldn’t know the consuming fire for a found mate.  (Bred the finding right out of them, Bucky suggested, long before humans had figured out how to strive for the same.)  Steve never told Peggy that born wolves and bitten weren’t the same at all—that they knew things she never would.

Someone had taken Bucky away from Steve when he was twelve years old, and Steve had come to in the basement of a church, his mouth bloody and his teeth pressed against a man’s throat.  The lycanthropes had tried to forget passion, and so Peggy couldn’t understand the desires that still howled just under her skin, had no words for something her pack refused to name.

She did know about rabid wolves, though, and finally gave Steve and Bucky the answers they had never gotten in Brooklyn, a dark alley and the low growl of a rabid dog.  Sometimes the wolf was too much, she told them, shrugging, because her cultured pack hadn’t explained to her that the wolf ran feral through her own blood.  They hadn’t told her that it was more than her willful spirit that brought her out to bars too late at night, the neckline of her dress dangerously low, her full lips an invitation and her sharp smile a threat.

They had been twelve years old and on a stake out.  Bucky had told Mr. Barnes that he was staying at Steve’s—he almost always was, that summer, Mrs. Barnes despaired of her oldest son ever sleeping at home—and Steve had told his Ma that they would be at Bucky’s listening to the new radio.  1930, and Mr. Klepper was  _ definitely  _ smuggling liquor for the mob.  They had just wanted to see him do it, to see the machine guns and the fast boats that the papers always said the mobsters used.

Twelve years old, two boys huddled behind a coal chute, sweating through their shirts in the muggy midnight air, whispering stories they’d heard about Lucky Luciano and his gang.  Steve didn’t even hear the growling, his good ear filled with Bucky’s quiet chatter, only noticed when Bucky went silent and tightened his grip on Steve’s arm.  Then there was only the flicker of the streetlamp, the silhouette of a nightmare and the shattered sound of Bucky’s scream.

_What’s it like_ , Peggy kept asking, never satisfied with Bucky’s lazy snarl or Steve’s shrug, _What’s it like to be turned?_

_It’s like being struck by lightning_ , Steve didn’t tell her, meeting Bucky’s pale eyes and tilting his head, neither of them saying anything about pain or terror or desperation and desire that ran soul deep. _It’s like being set on fire.  It’s like falling in love._


End file.
